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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (15 June) . . Page.. 1813 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

passes a valueless cheque to obtain goods or services, it can be almost impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant intended to defraud the payee when purporting to pay by cheque. The new provision will require a defendant who has presented a valueless cheque to provide evidence that he or she thought that the cheque would be honoured on presentation and did not intend to defraud. For example, a defendant could show that he or she had checked the account balance just before writing the cheque, or reasonably expected a salary payment to be deposited into the account to cover the cheque.

Clause 14 of the bill, and consequential amendments in Part 5, will enhance the protections available to persons arrested for summary offences. Part 1C of the Commonwealth Crimes Act 1914 already applies to the investigation of indictable offences under the laws of the ACT and contains important protections for suspects. For example, it contains the legislative requirement to allow an interview friend to be present when questioning a suspect who is an indigenous Australian. These provisions implement recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, particularly recommendation 224.

At present there is no equivalent legislative protection for suspects in relation to summary offences, which means that persons under arrest for such offences cannot enforce the rights and protections which are available to suspects for serious offences. The extension of Part 1C to summary offences will not, however, apply to summary offences against the Road Transport (Alcohol and Drugs) Act 1977 or to other traffic offences that can be dealt with by way of infringement notice. This is because it would be impractical to require the police to tape record or video every interview with every motorist who receives a traffic infringement notice, or to postpone carrying out a random breath test until an interview friend arrived. In terms of the summary offences at present, it reflects current police practice at any rate. Often when police interview people it is somewhat uncertain as to whether summary offences will flow or indictable offences. What is proposed just reflects current police practice.

Successful prosecutions are dependent on the availability of relevant and lawfully obtained evidence to establish the defendant's involvement in an offence. The existing legislative framework under which police officers investigate offences can sometimes limit their ability to collect such evidence before it is lost or destroyed. To ensure that our police have the powers they need and they deserve to do their jobs effectively, clauses 15 to 35 of the bill contain amendments to the Crimes Act 1900 which enhance existing powers by:

broadening the circumstances in which police may search people and vehicles, to bring our legislation into line with the New South Wales equivalent;

altering the threshold for exercising the power to arrest without warrant in certain circumstances from "reasonable belief" to "reasonable suspicion";

amending the personal search powers to facilitate searches by police officers of the same sex as the person being searched;

treating certain summary offences as indictable offences for the purposes of provisions which authorise entry into premises; and

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